The present invention relates to an attendant-controlled terminal for automatic enablement and monitoring of fuel dispensers, and more particularly relates to a cash/credit sales control terminal for use in a gasoline service station, which monitors and controls the amount of dispensed fuel from a plurality of gasoline pumps, combines miscellaneous sales information to the sale amount of a selected one of the pumps, prints individual customer receipts, automatically verifies a customer's credit status, and provides certain accounting and inventory functions.
Heretofore, equipment has been provided in service stations which permits the remote display of gasoline transactional information, i.e., the display of the dollar amount and gallonage of a pump transaction on a display console which may be located in the sales office of the service station, outside the view of the pump dispenser.
To utilize this information, however, the attendant must manually transcribe the displayed information onto a receipt/invoice for presentation to the customer. For credit transactions, the attendant must manually transfer the account number from the customer's embossed credit card onto the receipt, normally by means of a hand-operated embossing machine, and transcribe on the receipt the appropriate sales information. Verification of the customer's credit is often done manually via a printed "bad accounts" booklet, telephonically or electronically via a connection to a dedicated, on-line credit authorization network.
All of these manual operations are time-consuming to the attendant. With the recent trend toward single attendant operated, self-service stations, one of the problems which arises is that customers are kept waiting in line to pay the single attendant while the attendant transacts business with previous customers. This time consumption problem is further exacerbated, where the customer desires to purchase miscellaneous items in addition to his gasoline purchase, espceially when such purchases are by credit card.
The attendant's transactional operations are not only time-consuming, they are subject to error, illegibility and fraud. The attendant must have intelligence and training to transact business quickly with the customer so that customers are not kept waiting.
The prior art discloses a fully automated vending-type apparatus for the dispensement of fuel, described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,786,421 issued to W. Wostl on Jan. 15, 1974. The Wostl device provides a step forward in the art, eliminating the service station attendant altogether by permitting self-vending of the fuel and self-payment by the customer.
Wostl provides an automated service station having a control console into which a customer inserts his credit card. Identifying indicia on the credit card are read, and signals indicative of those identifying indicia are transmitted to a data bank in which is stored credit information on holders of credit cards. If the credit card is approved, the data bank returns an approval signal permitting the control console to receive from the customer an indication of the fuel or other goods which he desires to obtain. The control console enables the dispensing device for the selected goods, and the customer then actuates the dispensing device himself to obtain the goods.
The Wostl device, however, it not capable of handling the sales of goods which cannot be automatically dispensed, and, therefore, does not create a transactional receipt for such goods. Nor is the Wostl device compatible with conventional credit card processing in which credit card indicia is printed onto a receipt in a form recognizable by an optical reading device. The optical reading device is used to scan the transactional receipt in order to retrieve customer information and sales data for appropriately billing the customer.